A few months before Mary Austin Speaker moved away from New York, her city of many years, she started writing poetry on her train commute across the Manhattan Bridge. The result, called The Bridge, is emblematic of Speaker’s buoyant, radiant poetry, at once involved in a community—in this case the community of commuters in a given random subway car—and full of the lonesome individuality of a restless traveler. Speaker, who is well known for her design and editorial work over the last decade, gathered these train-born lines and arranged some of them into a sequence of poems, or maybe it’s a single long poem, that must rank as one of the most interesting, sustained poetic meditations on the rails in English. A tradition that includes Dante Gabriel Rossetti, C.S. Giscombe, Kai Carlson-Wee, and many others. And in Speaker’s case it’s a lyric of public transportation, too, in the vein of another great New York poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Commuters, caught in the “diurnal wretchedness” of repetitive laboring days, are in Speaker’s work rendered as fragments of consciousness in a mosaic of the daily intensities of living.